Henry VIII’s body odour

From Wikipedia

Imagine you have a time-machine to take you back to Tudor times. The possibilities are exciting enough, but quite naturally your first thought is to check out Henry VIII’s body odour. Were those Tudors as smelly as their rather basic lavatorial technology might suggest?

Time to find out - so into the time machine.

All goes well and you arrive at Henry's court without mishap. Disguised as a courtier, you sidle up to him during a convivial evening, taking a deep but unobtrusive sniff. Don’t want Henry to get wind of what you are up to do we?

What kind of odour would you expect? Well the wealthy Tudors were supposedly quite clean in their habits and it may be that spicy aromas would predominate around Henry such such as cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg. Maybe there were hints of rose water or lavender too.

Suppose you manage to get close to Henry, close enough to see the fine stubble on his chin, the colour of his fingernails, close enough to catch the sound of his voice, its depth and timbre, his accent and way with words, his use of them to command, control and signify approval. 

Imagine that you have stumbled on that most significant occasion when he first claps eyes on Anne Boleyn. You even catch that first, fatal glint of interest in the royal eye as it roams the hall.

To my mind, intimate details such as this divide the human race into two. 

Some people are interested in Tudor cleanliness, manners and habits. They are prepared to make informed but often unverifiable guesses based on what we know.

Others are more interested in how ephemeral and generally inaccessible this kind of information can be. In an important sense we don’t know the intimate details because we weren’t there, many are unrecorded and others were too fleeting and personal ever to have been publicly accessible anyway.

As for that flicker of interest at the sight of Anne Boleyn, what was going on there? Was it mostly a stir of interest in the royal member or something more cerebral? Did the English Reformation begin with a twitch of desire behind the royal codpiece rather than Henry’s desire for a male heir?

Obviously, even with the benefit of our time machine we can’t get inside his head to find out, let alone other more intimate aspects of whatever triggered the affair. Did such a huge upheaval in English history begin with biology?

However much we sift and analyse what we know of such matters, there are always these fleeting ephemera of human nature. The biology, the intimate psychology, the ebb and flow of hormones, subtle impressions we can never capture simply because nobody ever did or ever could have captured them.

Even Henry himself may not have been aware of them on that fateful occasion. As for Anne Boleyn – who can tell?

Lower your IQ

From AlanH

Bennett on growing old...

...but first Doris Day

The really frightening thing about middle age is the knowledge that you'll grow out of it. 

Doris Day

Frightening? During his late thirties, after his move to Paris, Arnold Bennett used his fictional characters to make a number of somewhat gloomy references to human mortality. Maybe he feared the onset of old age. However he died of typhoid aged 63, which certainly adds a poignant footnote to this :-

Yes,’ he sighed; ‘she contracted typhoid fever in Paris. It’s always more or less endemic there. And what with this hot summer and their water-supply and their drainage, it’s been more rife than usual lately.

Arnold Bennett – Hugo (1906)

Yet he moved to Paris. Maybe he was trying to escape the stifling atmosphere of middle class life. Or maybe it was in other people where he saw a need to escape the tick of the clock.

Poor tragic figure! Aged thirty-eight! An unromantic age, an age not calculated to attract sympathy from an unreflective world. But how in need of sympathy! Youth gone, innocence gone, enthusiasms gone, illusions gone, bodily powers waning! Only the tail-end of existence to look forward to!

Arnold Bennett – Whom God Hath Joined (1906)

‘How old are you, Diaz?’ ‘Thirty-six,’ he answered. ‘Why,’ I said, ‘you have thirty years to live.’

Arnold Bennett - Sacred and Profane Love (1905)

You may ask what right a man aged fifty odd has to talk of a life’s happiness — a man who probably has not more than ten years to live.

Arnold Bennett - Teresa of Watling Street (1904)

Sometimes Bennett also seemed to fear the wisdom of old age, as if disheartened by the prospect of understanding too much too late. I’m beginning to understand this one.

At seventy, men begin to be separated from their fellow-creatures. At eighty, they are like islets sticking out of a sea. At eighty-five, with their trembling and deliberate speech, they are the abstract voice of human wisdom. They gather wisdom with amazing rapidity in the latter years, and even their folly is wise then.

Arnold Bennett - Sacred and Profane Love (1905)

More subsidy please

Bloomberg Businessweek tells us how difficult things are for US wind turbine operators since the shale gas boom took hold.

Wind power in the U.S. is on a respirator.

The $14 billion industry, the world’s second-largest buyer of wind turbines, is reeling from a double blow -- cheap natural gas unleashed by the hydraulic fracturing revolution and the death last year of federal subsidies that made wind the most competitive of all renewable energy sources in the U.S.

Without restoration of subsidies, worth $23 per megawatt hour to turbine owners, the industry may not recover, and the U.S. may lose ground in its race to reduce dependence on the fossil fuels driving global warming, say wind-power advocates.

Consider that gas averaged $8.90 a million British thermal units in 2008 and plunged to $3.73 last year, making the fuel a cheaper source of electricity for utilities. Congress allowed the wind Production Tax Credit to expire last year, and wind farm construction plunged 92 percent.

While here in the UK we have PPE graduate Ed Davey keeping a benign eye on our energy policies. What could possibly go wrong?

Tips on North Korean travel

Juche Travel Services offers a few tips for those wishing to take a holiday in North Korea.

All tourists to the DPRK, whether you visit as a group or private tour, whether you book your tour with us or another company, will be accompanied by two KITC guides, who will escort you at all times from the moment you arrive in the country until you leave. This applies whether you are in a group or just a single traveller. You are not allowed to travel independently around the country.

The DPRK possesses a unique social and political system, and travellers to the country are asked to respect this. Regardless of your own views, the people of the DPRK hold the eternal President Kim Il Sung and his son and present ruler General Kim Jong Il in extremely high regard. Any outward criticism, sarcasm, or negative comments about either individual will not be tolerated.

You will find your guides are sometimes quite sensitive about photography, especially if it is of something deemed to 'misrepresent' or paint the country in a negative light.

For personal expenditure in the country, we recommend taking Euros in cash. US Dollars and Yuan are also permitted, but Euros are preferred. Be sure to take small denomination notes with you, as change is often not available for larger notes. Credit cards are NOT accepted and there are no ATMs in the country, therefore please bring sufficient cash to last for your stay. Tourists are not permitted to use the local currency (Korean Won).

If you are a journalist and wish to travel to the DPRK, I am afraid we are not the people to help you. We are a tourist organisation and consequently are permitted to take only genuine tourists to the country. If you are a journalist, we suggest you contact your local DPRK Embassy to help arrange your visit. If you are a journalist, please, PLEASE do not try and sneak your way in to the country by pretending to be a tourist. It will create all sorts of problems for yourself, for us, and worst of all, for your Korean hosts.

City of vast and restless melancholy

Portland Place, London, 1906
From bbc.co.uk

Lawrence did not greatly love London. It appealed to his imagination, but in a sinister way. To him it was the city of vast and restless melancholy.

And though there was nothing of the sentimental in his composition, he despised the facile trick of fancy which attributes to cities, heroically, the joys and griefs of the unheroic individuals composing them; London did nevertheless impress him painfully as an environment peculiarly favourable to the intensification of sorrow.

Whenever he went to London it seemed to him to be the home of a race sad, hurried, and preoccupied; the streets were filled with people who had not a moment to spare, and whose thoughts were turned inward upon their own anxious solicitudes, people who must inevitably die before they had begun to live, and to whom the possession of their souls in contemplation would always be an impossibility.

Arnold Bennett – Whom God Hath Joined (1906)

Over a century later I find I’m no fan of London either. For me there is something weird about the place. I prefer small towns, open spaces, hills, valleys and high moorland where the call of a curlew speaks to that poetic spark lurking in all our souls.

Maybe you have to be a Londoner.

Maria Miller was peer-reviewed

For those of us interested in behaviour and language, the ghastly and demeaning Maria Miller affair also has another interesting aspect. Her activities were supposedly peer-reviewed by a committee of MPs. It comes as no surprise that the independent parliamentary watchdog doesn't think peer-review by MPs is a good idea.

Iain Duncan Smith was speaking after the independent parliamentary watchdog said MPs should "no longer mark their own homework" on ethics.

It comes after a committee of MPs overruled investigators probing Culture Secretary Maria Miller's expenses.

There is no real alternative to personal integrity. Peer-review is no guarantee of anything and isn't restricted to dodgy scientists.